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Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How Pope Francis Saved the Catholic Church From JD Vance
It was disconcerting to watch JD Vance being received by the ailing Pope Francis at the Vatican this past Easter. The pope, like a character in a cheap airport thriller, had 24 hours to live. And Vance, an only recently converted Catholic, struck many other Catholics as a born-again Christian nationalist in Catholic garb—as he misread the Catholic teaching of ordo amoris to justify cruelty to migrants, then tormented the president of Ukraine in an Oval Office struggle session where Yale law sophistry met with good ol' hillbilly thuggery. It was all this and the fact of Vance as an opportunist so calculating he must have known that, at the moment of Francis's death, he'd be the most powerful Catholic in the world—a fact speaking to how, over the last quarter-century, Protestant America (O, Appalachian snake handlers; O, UFC cathedrals; O, City on a Thrill) had achieved a spiritual collapse so staggering as to affect even the Church of his presidency, George W. Bush began painting portraits of American men and women who had been dismembered in his wars. It was touching, perverse, sincere, this attempted self-exorcism. He painted and he painted, making icons of the victims of his own crimes, wars that Bush—a born-again cowboy of Puritan ancestry—had tried selling to the French president, Jacques Chirac, in messianic terms: He said that two demons, Gog and Magog, were at work in the Middle East, where soon a new age would dawn. Bush was right about the new age, but sloppy on geography. The response to 9/11 was a wave of government spending and borrowing to prop up the economy and finance conflicts costing approximately $8 trillion. This was just a warm-up act for the 2008 financial crisis, after which trillions were injected into the economy to bail out Wall Street. Money, Bush might have learned from his father, doesn't trickle down; it gathers to itself. Occupy Wall Street protested emerging oligarchy, but their camp at Zuccotti Park was cleared out by Michael Bloomberg, a financial services billionaire. America's rich were not chastened, but emboldened, by the 2008 crash, and they got away with it. Money wasn't up for discussion, and as the printing of easy dollars continued under Obama, inequality soared and culture turned brutal. There was division along every axis, accelerated by data mining, screens, and algorithms. Soon there were two antagonistic poles that held each other beyond redemption. On the left, some unfortunate soul recalled a word, woke, from the Civil Rights days, as a call for vigilance amid injustice. The right was merciless, hammering 'wokeness' as a secular religion. The left, in turn, taunted MAGA as a death cult whose members had mistaken a living Cheeto for the Hale-Bopp comet. In reaching for sectarian terms, neither side was wrong. The demons Gog and Magog didn't materialize in the Middle East, but after the desert wars two equally dangerous religious forces emerged at home: founding strains of American Protestantism that, once bizarrely contained in the person of George W. Bush, now began fighting across 1632, the first Bush sailed from England and settled in Plymouth with other Puritan zealots who had the misfortune of believing that only a handful of souls would ever go to heaven, and humanity was irretrievably fallen. In Albion's Seed, a survey of founding American folkways and how they still define us, David Hackett Fischer describes the consequences of this grim view—endless purification and joyless theocracy. They frowned on bright colors. A Puritan church's only adornment would be an eye painted on the pulpit, its surveilling gaze extending to the bedroom. Unable to accept human nature, they obsessed over bestiality, once admitting a deformed piglet as a witness in order to convict and hang the man suspected of fathering it. When another piglet was born 'with one red eye and what appeared to be a penis growing out of its head' it was all too much; 'the magistrates compelled everyone in town to view it in hopes of catching the malefactor.' Wealth was a divine reward for God alone to give. Speculators and profiteers were fined, shamed, and exiled. The manipulations that caused the 2008 crash and inequality that followed would have been as offensive to these people as it was to their contemporary heirs at universities like Yale and Harvard, former Puritan seminaries where people now longed for cultural purification. To deconstruct gender, to root out structural racism and toxic masculinity, to decolonize fitness (even wellness was unwell, in late America) and maybe even purify America's own essential invention: whiteness itself. To find, at long last, the pig-fucker. Here was a last-ditch effort at imposing morality on a runaway capitalism. With the legislature broken, it was necessarily illiberal, sometimes running into the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In fullest form, it operated through institutional departments of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Puritan streak so ingrained that even the movement's most educated maybe didn't realize that of all acronyms, the one they'd chosen—DEI—was Latin for from God. All of this meant incredibly well, and was bound to torment the other America line embodied in Bush—the royalist planters of Puritans denounced speculators in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, another group of English Protestants were busy devising ways to extract as much as possible from the land itself and other human bodies. These were the royalist Anglicans of Virginia, whose system of race slavery and native dispossession would find its way west to Texas. Their world was vicious from the start, with cannibalism in the early years, and mortality rates between 40 and 60 percent. They had recently rebelled against the pope of Rome, declaring the English monarch a semi-sacred figure from whom oligarchy flowed as an extension of divine right. Bigoted and land-hungry, they mounted an insurrection when the colonial governor refused to dispossess Native Americans, igniting Bacon's Rebellion, which sent the governor fleeing to England as Jamestown was torched—it turns out that after breaking with a pope in Rome, sacking a local governor is easy. Men took many mistresses and raped their slaves; and even the women, writes Hackett, horrified visitors by 'carefully examining' the genitals of enslaved men at the market where lives were sold. It's no surprise that the nativists who ignored Trump's sexual assaults then attacked the U.S. Capitol to cement his rule and the culturally purifying left would end up fighting over the future of the Puritans' most enduring institution, Harvard University, which didn't just raise $750 million in debt to defend itself against Trump from any lack of real existential peril. What no one saw coming was that somewhere across years of this essentially sectarian conflict, the American Catholic Church, still reeling from endemic molestations and cover-ups, began looking good by comparison. It had a new pope, in Francis, who dedicated himself to two things that warring Americas didn't value very highly: mercy and contrition. He acknowledged the horrors of clergy abuse and apologized to Canada's First Peoples for forced assimilation and cultural destruction. Asked if there was a place for gays in the church, he said, 'If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?' The Catholic position against abortion is unchangeable, a long-running reaction to imperial Roman bloodlust and infanticide. Still, Francis preached compassion to women receiving abortions, and more importantly, forgiveness. Modest? Maybe, but compared to the bleakness of victim/victimizer dialectics—it was human, even hopeful. Then came another twist. As American despair deepened, born-agains started converting to Catholicism. These are the people whose grandfathers might have agreed with the charges that Protestant nativists loudly leveled against John F. Kennedy—that a Catholic in high office would have to take orders from the pope in Rome, i.e., could never be a real American. They could never have imagined that the Catholic in question might be a JD Vance or that the pope would be a guy from Chicago. Pope Leo was born Robert Prevost in a humble home on the South Side of the city. He attended a seminary high school and then Villanova, founded by Irish Augustinian friars in Philadelphia, a school whose institutional memory might have prepared him for the America to come; it was briefly closed after nativist riots in 1844. He joined the Augustinians after graduating, then spent a decade with their mission to Peru, a country to which he returned in 2014, sent back by the ailing Pope Francis. He notably said nothing of America or Chicago in his first speech, but spoke directly to 'my dear diocese of Chiclayo, in Peru.' The man Americans were celebrating as their first pope seemed, along the way, to have become spiritually, well, Latin American—a fact that might have challenged Americans dug into rigid identity binaries. It was celebrated by the Peruvians themselves, and the phenomenon of Leo's absorption of multiple cultural identities makes perfect sense to a well-travelled Catholic, who knows how the church changes across cultures, making good on its name—'All-Embracing.' And it wasn't lost on the Argentine Pope Francis when he made Prevost a Peruvian bishop in 2014, thus requiring him to gain Peruvian citizenship. Or in 2023, when he made him a cardinal and called him to Rome, thus creating that most rare and alluring of papal candidates: a pope from both Americas with a Vatican mailing address. A successor. We now know that, in the meeting of Vance and Francis, the ailing man held the stronger hand: the creation of an 'American' pope from Peru. One whose presence not only insulates the Catholic faith from America's right wing, her spiritual meltdown, but also, in an act of sage tenderness, offers aspects of the faith that Francis practiced so beautifully: a radical challenge, of mercy, of compassion that, given Leo's youth, could last a decade or more, carried out under a name chosen to honor its previous holder, Leo XII, who in his encyclical of the first Gilded Age, 1891's Rerum Novarum, famously spoke of the eternal duty of the rich to the poor, of capital to labor, and of the machine to the spirit. What is there to say of this, in the spring, weeks after Easter, amid the miracle of flowers? There are lines from psalms that only gain in meaning with repetition, revealing depths of wisdom and renewal: 'This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it' (Psalms 118:24).
The Verge
12-05-2025
- Politics
- The Verge
Indigenous scientists are fighting to protect their data — and their culture
Every month, a group of Indigenous scientists from around the world gathers on Zoom. They never have an agenda. They meet as colleagues to catch up and commiserate about the challenges of being Indigenous in Western academia. Their February meeting, however, quickly struck a different tone. 'There was this cascade that started happening,' recalled Max Liboiron, a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland who hosts the virtual calls. 'Everyone in the US was like, ' Holy shit. My career is over. My students' funding is screwed.'' Liboiron immediately entered triage mode. A geographer and university administrator by trade, Liboiron used to organize with Occupy Wall Street. 'I was a full-time activist,' they said over Zoom. With their hair buzzed and arms tattooed, Liboiron's past life isn't hard to imagine. They're Red River Métis, the Indigenous peoples of Canada's prairie provinces, and speak with a candidness that is both cool and calculated. Since Donald Trump entered office, Liboiron has put those rapid-response skills to use to support their US colleagues in need. US federal law recognizes many tribal nations as sovereign political entities, not racial or ethnic groups, but that hasn't stopped Trump from sweeping up Indigenous peoples in his attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). From Alaska to New England, Indigenous researchers — and the communities they serve — are losing access to dollars for critical science that could help them amid the planet's changing temperatures. They're worried that the loss, theft, seizure, or privatization of their research — which often includes ancient cultural knowledge — could be next. After all, the US and Canada hold a nasty track record on Indigenous rights from centuries of theft, genocide, and ongoing oppression: 'That starts in 1492,' Liboiron said. Indigenous communities are now concerned that the government may weaponize their data against them, using it to justify the surveillance of their activities or extraction of valuable resources on their lands. 'Everyone in the US was like, ' Holy shit. My career is over. My students' funding is screwed.'' 'We have to have more control over how the settler-state represents us in data, how they collect data about us,' Liboiron said, describing discussions on Indigenous data sovereignty in the '90s. 'The movement comes out of an idea of mismanagement through bad data practices from the state.' There's a new level of uncertainty since tech billionaire Elon Musk's mysterious invasion of sensitive federal data. 'There's an unknown relationship between what Musk can touch and our data,' Liboiron said. After the disturbing February discussion, Liboiron sent out a survey to assess everyone's needs: 'Servers were immediately on that list.' These servers are repositories for anything digital, including research. Liboiron and this group are part of a decades-long movement around Indigenous data sovereignty and governance, which advocates for the rights of Indigenous peoples in determining who accesses, manages, and owns their information. Data can include anything from environmental DNA to oral history audio recordings. They're often sensitive, too. Indigenous peoples don't want this information falling into the wrong hands — or, worse, disappearing entirely — but the federal government is looking like less of an ally with each passing day. Under the first Trump presidency, scientists were concerned only about federal data, but the behavior in the second term is unprecedented. 'The rule of law and norms of governance, the norms and laws of jurisdiction, no longer apply,' Liboiron said. 'Even if your data isn't held by the federal government or funded by the federal government, it's become very clear that different parts of the federal government can reach into almost anywhere and intervene.' A possible solution has already emerged: private servers located in foreign countries. Through the IndigeLab Network Liboiron codirects, members have already identified at least three locations in Canada where Indigenous data can be securely stored. While the researchers finalize access to new servers, they have turned to cloud storage, using providers like CryptPad, a France-based alternative to Google Docs, and Sync, a Canadian-based alternative to Dropbox. 'I've gone from basically protesting and staying safe to massively mobilizing resources with the same techniques,' Liboiron said. One ally is Angie Saltman, a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta and founder and president of Saltmedia, a Canadian-based tech company with its own data center. Saltmedia and its sister company, IT Horizons, work with a range of clients, including private industry, government, First Nations, and Indigenous nonprofit and for-profit organizations. Saltman thinks of her client relationships similarly to that of a landlord and tenant. 'We will look after the house, but we usually set it up so that our team doesn't get to creep in the house,' she explained. Meanwhile, Big Tech companies in the US, like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, can creep all they want. They have long collaborated with law enforcement agencies to hand over users' private data. Lately, they've been aligning themselves with Trump through donations and internal policy changes. Data storage isn't everything Indigenous data sovereignty ultimately goes deeper than servers and technology, though. It's about stewarding the cultures and autonomies of Indigenous peoples, recognizing the intellect of Indigenous peoples, and training the next generation to continue that legacy. 'Indigenous peoples have always been data experts,' said Riley Taitingfong, a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance who is Chamorro. She points to the historical Marshallese stick charts, made of coconut strips and cowrie shells, her ancestors used to record sea data and voyage safely. Indigenous peoples in unincorporated US territories, like Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, face unique challenges around Indigenous data sovereignty due to their lack of federal recognition. This movement is also about trust — between researchers and the communities they serve, as well as between Indigenous peoples and the federal government. But trust isn't built overnight. 'You have to reckon with all the stuff you've done as an institution and also as an individual,' said Stephanie Russo Carroll, director of the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance who helped author the CARE Principles that guide conversations on Indigenous data sovereignty. 'Even as an Indigenous individual, you have to reckon with how your mind has been colonized.' 'I've gone from basically protesting and staying safe to massively mobilizing resources with the same techniques.' At Memorial University, Liboiron created a contract template between the university and Indigenous communities in 2019 whose language cements that Indigenous partners own and benefit from a particular research project. The University of Maine similarly signs memoranda of understanding with the Wabanaki Nations researchers with whom it regularly collaborates. 'The solutions to this are not just digital tech solutions,' said Carroll, who is Ahtna, a citizen of the Native Village of Kluti-Kaah in Alaska. 'We're talking about real shifts in power and real shifts in authority and real depth of relational work.' Relationships push progress forward: The Trump administration hasn't stopped the National Institutes of Health from finalizing a policy that would require federal researchers to seek permission from tribes to access their data in the agency's databases, according to NIH Tribal Health Research Office Director Karina Walters. Elsewhere in the federal government, however, Indigenous leaders are losing their contacts as the Trump administration fires staff. Now, advocates are increasingly looking to state governments, which also harbor health and environmental data Indigenous peoples need. Climate crisis adds urgency In Washington, for example, the Tulalip Tribes and Department of Health recently signed an agreement — the state's first — that gives tribes direct access to lab reports and disease updates that will help safeguard their communities' well-being. As climate change contributes to more public health emergencies, Indigenous peoples also urgently need access to data from weather satellites, medicinal plants, and nonhuman relatives, like salmon and alewives. After all, every Indigenous community is different, but a common thread unites them: their connections to the earth and the flora and fauna with whom they share it. In many cultures, animals, plants, waterways, and the cosmos are seen as relatives. 'The health of the land is the health of the people,' said Christina E. Oré, an associate director at Seven Directions, an Indigenous public health institute at the University of Washington. She is an Andean descendant of Peru. 'The health of the land is the health of the people.' Back at the University of Maine, anthropology professor Darren Ranco, who is a citizen of the Penobscot Nation, wrapped up a project in December where his team gathered audio recordings from Wabanaki knowledge holders (elders enshrined with caretaking duties to guard and share Indigenous knowledge) who lived through previous disasters. The researchers analyzed the oral histories and cultural expertise alongside climate change data, like precipitation patterns and air and water temperatures, to identify earlier adaptation strategies that may be helpful in responding to current climate impacts. 'The data was related to tribal perspectives on past, current, and future environmental and climate change,' Ranco explained. 'This isn't the first time we've adapted to a changing climate.' The data was jointly controlled by the scientists and the tribal communities during the research, but instead of following the standard protocol of deleting the human subject data upon project completion, the team released all the information to the tribes. Now, the relevant communities have access to the information as long as they like without having to seek permission or jump through hoops. Desi Small-Rodriguez, executive director of the Data Warriors Lab and UCLA sociology professor, has been working with her leaders at the Northern Cheyenne Nation to eliminate those hoops entirely by drafting a tribal law to protect their ancestral knowledge. The hope is to pass it later this year. Right now, tribal leaders struggle to access necessary information about fisheries and air and water quality. In some cases, the government is already collecting this data. Tribes just aren't let in. 'How do we get the data that's already out there back into our hands? And how do we also rebuild data that we haven't had in our communities for a very, very long time?' Small-Rodriguez said. 'We're moving forward to figure out how we use the white man's law to protect Cheyenne data.' Small-Rodriguez is worried about who is currently running the US federal government. She can't trust Trump — and definitely not Musk — with her people's cultural knowledge. She trusts her Indigenous relatives in the US and beyond. In March, she visited her Māori peers who invited her to New Zealand to collaborate on solutions to the crisis US Indigenous researchers face. In April, Small-Rodriguez was in Australia for a Global Indigenous Data Governance conference.
Newsweek
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Newsweek
Tim Pool Hits Back at Critics Over White House Clothing
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Tim Pool has responded to criticism over the fact that he did not wear a suit to the White House briefing room on April 22. Pool, who showed up to the White House in a beanie and a hoodie, said on X (formerly Twitter) that he "intentionally did not dress up for these dirty dirty smear merchants," referring to other reporters in the briefing room. No Harry you don't get it I intentionally did not dress up for these dirty dirty smear merchants When I met Trump I wore a suit — Tim Pool (@Timcast) April 22, 2025 Pool has been working in media since 2011, when he began livestreaming the Occupy Wall Street movement. He then worked for Vice and Fusion TV before launching his own YouTube channel and podcast. Newsweek has contacted Pool's YouTube show, Timcast, via email for comment. Why It Matters Pool sat in the "new media" seat at the White House on Tuesday, a new chair created by President Donald Trump's administration for non-traditional reporters such as YouTubers and podcasters. While the White House said this new seating plan reflected the modern media landscape, traditional outlets claimed it undermined their ability to ask challenging questions of the White House, as the "new media" reporters are largely right-wing commentators with questions that are friendly to the administration. Tim Pool in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Tuesday, April 22, 2025, in Washington D.C. Tim Pool in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Tuesday, April 22, 2025, in Washington D.C. Alex Brandon/AP Photo What To Know Pool attended the White House briefing room on Tuesday to discuss the ongoing case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is being held in a detention center in El Salvador without access to due process. Pool has expressed disdain for the media over a number of news agenda items, but most recently over coverage of Abrego Garcia, whom he has said should not be referred to as a "Mayland man." He is referred to by many outlets as a "Maryland man" because he was living in the state with his wife and child before being deported without trial to El Salvador. Pool believes this is a misnomer because he originally came to the U.S. without documentation from El Salvador in 2012, and his line of questions at the White House allowed press secretary Karoline Leavitt to reiterate the government's position. His attire was called out by several people, including Harry Sisson, a left-wing TikTok creator and influencer, who called Pool "a hypocrite" for not wearing a suit. This is because Pool used his show, Timcast, to criticize Ukrainian President Zelensky for not wearing a suit when he attended the White House in February. On Timcast, Pool said: "Everybody knows that I'm, like, a very anti-suit, kind of slovenly guy. When we were told by people who worked with Trump. Like, friends of ours who work in the Republican Party, Trump is here. There's a bunch of senators and prominent individuals. You can come, you must wear a suit. I said, 'Yes sir.' And went and bought one. Zelensky doesn't." Zelensky has not worn a suit to the White House since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine War, saying he dresses down in solidarity with Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines. Pool refuted the idea that he was being hypocritical, as he said he wore a suit to meet with Trump, but did not wear one to the briefing room. President Donald Trump, right, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House on February 28, 2025, in Washington D.C. President Donald Trump, right, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House on February 28, 2025, in Washington D.C. Mystyslav Chernov, File/AP Photo What People Are Saying Harry Sisson on X: "Tim Pool cried about President Zelensky not wearing a suit when he met with Trump, but this is how Tim showed up to the White House today. Zip-up jacket and a beanie. Maybe he shouldn't be such a hypocrite!" Tim Pool on X: "No, Harry, you don't get it. I intentionally did not dress up for these dirty dirty smear merchants. When I met Trump I wore a suit." What Happens Next Media attention will be focused on what Pool wears to the next White House press briefing he attends. There is no briefing scheduled for April 23.
Washington Post
16-04-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
The billionaire presidency is here. How's the 99 percent feeling?
NEW YORK — On a Friday night in late March, about 50 people, in costume as members of the 1 percent, arrived at an 'anti-billionaire bash' at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture in Park Slope to playact as plutocrats. The name of the game was 'Billionaire Uh-Oh!' The host, Marcela Mulholland, stood at a lectern and read hypothetical scenarios in which uber-wealthy people got into trouble, and three teams crafted ways out of sticky situations. For instance: Your son hits an elderly woman with his Audi. How do you make sure he still gets into Dartmouth? The groups mirthfully discussed the possible 'solutions.' Say she wasn't on the crosswalk! Say she was crazy! Find a homeless man! If he's not drunk, get him drunk — and have him hit her! Another problem: Your wife was overheard singing a racial slur while showering post-SoulCycle. How do you keep her upcoming birthday party in the Hamptons from turning into a bust? Get the same homeless man — sorry, person experiencing homelessness — to change his gender identity and take the blame! This was a night of Dada, an attempt by the partygoers to cope with the fact that the billionaire president and his astronomically wealthy advisers are seizing the levers of government, purging civil servants and generally manifesting nightmares for mainline liberals and Bernie Bros alike. Since reclaiming the White House, President Donald Trump has empowered Elon Musk and his U.S. DOGE Service to recommend dramatic cuts to the federal workforce. The Senate has confirmed several mega-rich people to Trump's Cabinet — including Linda McMahon, who is presiding over the administration's bid to dismantle the Education Department, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a pair of Wall Street veterans who have championed the president's combative approach to global trade. The anti-billionaire party was happening seven subway stops from Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street activists protested economic inequality in 2011, and just a few blocks northwest of Prospect Park, where Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), in 2016, had welcomed a massive crowd to a 'political revolution' that vilified corporate executives, not federal workers. Suffice to say, America has gone a different way. 'The wealthiest people have nevah, everrr, in the history of our country, had it so good,' Sanders declared at a March rally in Nevada. He wasn't waving a white flag: The theme of the rally — and similar ones in Colorado, Arizona and California, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) — was 'Fight Oligarchy,' and backstage the senator from Vermont seemed to be holding hope that the president would notice the large crowds at these events and have a change of heart. 'He's gonna look at that,' Sanders told The Washington Post, 'and say, 'Mmmmmmmm.' You know, 'Hey, guys, hey, Elon, calm down a bit. Maybe the American people don't like what we're doing.'' At the Brooklyn anti-billionaire party, Mulholland wasn't holding her breath. She was very much a Resister during the first Trump term and later the political director of polling firm Data for Progress. Now? 'It feels so futile,' says Mulholland, 27. 'You're like, oh, donate to this, or like, go to the rally or sign this petition. And it's like, I don't actually know that I believe in the theory of change for a lot of those.' 'But at the same time,' she added, 'I feel like something in you dies if you watch injustice happening and you do nothing.' The party was something. A pop-up sketch comedy show? A solidarity exercise? A flier encouraged guests to donate $10 per drink — vodka-cran labeled 'Theranos juice' was on offer — to a union organizing group. 'Pronouns prohibited,' the invitation read. 'BYOSSRIs. All proceeds to the woke mind virus.' People dressed as Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Tiger Woods, Elon Musk. Katie Mackall, a 27-year-old clinical research coordinator from Bushwick, came as 'Elon Musk's dad's emerald mine.' She wore glittery green eye shadow, sequins and fishnet sleeves, plus a green hard hat with a headlight. (Errol Musk has said he owned a small portion of such a mine in Zambia, though Elon has in recent years questioned the mine's existence.) Mulholland dressed as Lauren Sánchez, the helicopter pilot, philanthropist and fiancée of Amazon founder (and Post owner) Jeff Bezos. There were a few fake Bezoses, too, mingling in dark shirts and puffy vests. Did they care to comment — in character, of course — on criticisms that they'd been making nice with the Trump administration? 'I think we do business with whoever the American people choose to elect into office,' said one ersatz Bezos, a comedian named Simon Bloch. 'We don't take sides. We just want to do good business and deliver better for our customers, honestly.' 'People are jealous,' said another, a campaign consultant named Guido Girgenti. 'I built some s--- that everybody can use, right? If you did that, you'd be a billionaire.' Do Americans resent rich people, or idolize them? The answer is yes. 'We've always been an aspirational society, since the beginning,' says Jonathan Taplin, the Los Angeles-based author of a book on powerful tech billionaires. 'And the notion for immigrants … that the streets of America were paved with gold, and all you had to do was get past Ellis Island and you, too, could become a millionaire — that's been around for a long time.' Over the years, the public and its servants have tried to break up monopolies and levy steep taxes on the rich to prevent them from accumulating too much power. But something seems to have changed in recent years, says Guido Alfani, an Italian scholar and the author of a history of the rich in the West. 'Many presidents have been accused of being too close to extreme wealth, and so forth and so on,' he says, 'but no other country has ever got as close as the United States is today to being actually run by the super-rich.' How did the billionaire(s) win this time? With a crucial boost from the working class. Fifty-six percent of voters without college degrees went for Trump, according to exit polling by Edison Research. Sixty-nine percent of White men without college degrees voted for the president in the same poll. White men without degrees have continued to support Trump overwhelmingly, as of a poll conducted early last month by NBC: 69 percent viewed the president positively. (Musk seems to be reaping the benefits of his association with the Trump administration with that same group: Among all White voters, NBC found, only men without college degrees held a positive view of the world's richest man.) In addition to the White working-class voters who have favored him for a while, Trump's winning coalition last year was buoyed by increases in support from heavily Latino, working-class communities: Pennsylvania factory towns and the Texas borderlands, among others. Eddie Padron doesn't see Trump and Musk as snooty people with their noses up in the air, but as hard workers trying to build a company — sort of like him. Padron, a precinct chair for his local Republican Party, has been in the locksmithing business in Brownsville, Texas, for 44 years. About a decade ago, he says, he got a call to drive out to a community about 20 miles outside of town. At a small apartment complex that had been foreclosed on, there were two men asking him to rekey every front and back door. They had one instruction: Put all the locks on the same key. 'And that,' Padron says, 'was our first taste of SpaceX.' Musk and his space technology company were moving in, buying up more and more property, which meant more business for the locksmith. Padron sees it like this: There's the way business works, and then there's the way government works. If the cashier at your H-E-B supermarket is giving you attitude, you talk to the manager, and they make it right so they can keep getting your dollar. 'For the first time in the history,' he said of Musk's partnership with Trump, 'you have a manager who's taking care of business.' (Musk recently estimated that his DOGE cuts will save the government $150 billion in the next fiscal year, although some analysts say such savings could be offset if staff cuts at the IRS hamper tax collection.) The federal bureaucracy can feel sluggish — less responsive to people's needs than the corporations they associate with next-day shipping, on-demand streaming, instant search results, the world in their pocket. 'The reason the government gets blamed and has so much worse popularity and polling than Amazon as a company is because Amazon does what [you expect it to do],' says Corbin Trent, a former adviser to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez who now runs a home remodeling business in Tennessee. 'The government doesn't do what we expect it to do, which is function for us,' he added. 'What Trump did very intelligently is, he said: 'The system is broken, right? I'm going to smash the system,'' Sanders told The Post. Some working-class voters may not have seen a vote for Trump as a vote for the billionaire(s). Some may have seen it as a vote for the guy who takes care of business, even when that means smashing things. Andrew Macey, a mechanical repairman in Clairton, Pennsylvania, voted for Trump in November. It was the first time he voted for a Republican. His union, U.S. Steelworkers Local 1557, had endorsed the billionaire, and although Macey knew wealthy men had different concerns — stock portfolios, not the cost of eggs — Macey had shaken Trump's hand at a rally, and he had faith that the former and future president would use the government to protect the steel industry and make things cheaper for him and his fellow workers. 'He told everybody, no matter what party [they were] in, that it was going to be better his first day in office,' Macey says. 'But the exact opposite has happened. Prices rose. The stock market is in shambles, and the prices are going to go up even higher because of these, you know, across-the-board tariffs.' Trump's tariffs, which his administration has characterized as part of an effort to protect the jobs of America's working class, have worried some of the president's richest allies. Arguably the president's trade policies represent a willingness to buck corporate interests in favor of a worker-focused agenda, but critics have said his strategy would drive up retail prices and suffocate the economy, resulting in hardship for everybody. Trump has since pressed pause on many of the levies while escalating his trade war with China. Smashing systems isn't the same as fixing them. It remains to be seen whether the president will stay in the graces of their working-class supporters if his government cuts and economic policies start to make things feel more broken than before. Michael Rivera, a Republican commissioner in Berks County, Pennsylvania — where Trump saw a surge in support in the heavily Latino city of Reading — says he has been getting questions about the government cuts at his town hall meetings. 'They're like: 'What's going to happen to Social Security? What's going to happen with Medicare? How is this going to affect our jobs here in Berks County?'' Rivera says. Could the left beat billionaires in the future, with the help of the working class? It's at least healthy if people criticize them, says Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer and leftist commentator. 'A lot of people yell at me,' Piker says. 'I'm now a very successful content creator, and I have a nice house. I bought it so I can live there with my family. And, you know, I leased a Porsche. People always yell at me for these things. They say, 'You're rich, too.' And I always say it's good. It's good that you hate me for that reason.' At the Brooklyn party, the imaginary way back to the Bernie timeline was paved with irony. The costumed 'billionaires' flew paper airplanes in a contest to emit the most carbon. They made tiny babies out of Play-Doh, an allusion to pronatalism. Something to do. 'It's very easy to feel like you can't do anything,' said Anya Schulman, 29, a writer and content creator from Fort Greene who was dressed as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. 'These problems are bigger than us, than somebody even living in New York, working like me with a six-figure salary. Like, I'm barely making my rent. How can I do anything? I think events like this are very important to remind us that productive action is actually very doable on a personal level.' In the end, the group raised about $1,000 for the union organizers. After the games were over, they ate cake — specifically, a Costco slab iced with an edible image of Luigi Mangione.
Forbes
24-03-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Beyond The Zero-Sum Game: Worker And Business Success Go Hand In Hand
From the industrial strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the relationship between workers and business is often framed as a zero-sum game in which gains for one side mean losses for the other. This long standing tension has fueled a widespread perception that to be pro-worker is necessarily to be anti-business, and to be pro-business is to be anti-worker. In an era of historically polarized politics, this binary viewpoint seems – on the surface – to be as prevalent as ever. But it doesn't take much digging before the policy and political divisions start to become more complicated, from the Republican party's inroads among union voters to the former CEOs who staunchly opposed the Trump campaign. As is so often the case, the perspectives of workers and businesses are never quite as clear-cut as they seem. Not only is the zero-sum game artificially narrow, it's also counterproductive. It's a false divide that has stalled progress, stagnating efforts to agree on the means to achieve common goals and limiting policy solutions and business strategies that could strengthen the economy for everyone. Consider the question of job quality. Well-intentioned researchers have, in some cases, defined job quality through the lens of income, arguing that 'payment, after all, is a primary reason why people work.' While compensation is an important lever, focusing entirely on payment makes it even easier to fall into zero-sum thinking: more money for workers means less money for employers and vice versa. The reality is that, like so many other debates, the quality of a job depends on more than just income, and the question of what policy or business steps to take to improve job quality is a 'yes, and' more than an 'either-or.' At the end of the day, businesses thrive when workers do. Research shows that safe workplaces, fair scheduling practices, and yes, competitive wages, don't just benefit employees — they also have the power to improve retention, productivity, and long-term economic competitiveness. Being a good business, in short, is good business. Instead of falling into the trap of treating job quality as a tug-of-war between worker advocates and business leaders, it's time to focus on solutions that achieve our shared goal: a stronger economy built on quality jobs. Getting there will require not just acknowledging the multiple factors that shape job quality – including policy, economic conditions, and business practices –but also finding common ground to drive meaningful change. That means identifying politically 'agnostic' solutions to expand quality jobs that both workers and businesses can get behind, including: Measuring what we want to monitor Peter Drucker famously argued that what gets measured gets managed: if you don't have the information, it's impossible to know what works or to make changes to improve. In the words of Rachel Korberg, co-founder and executive director of the Families and Workers Fund, "The U.S. measures job quantity all the time, but we still do not systematically measure job quality—that is, not just if someone has a job but rather if that job enables them to pay their bills, train and advance in their career, and take care of their family." Everyone stands to benefit from data that can supplement the country's existing focus on job quantity with a deeper understanding of job quality. A clearer articulation of how wages, hours, and benefits translate to worker retention or productivity can help businesses make investments that increase both the quality of their jobs and their bottom line. Further proving the links between upskilling and retention can equip employers to quantify the return-on-investment of training programs. Knowing where quality jobs exist – and where they don't – can empower policymakers to invest in the regions that need it most. Quality training for quality jobs Investing in workers through on-the-job training can boost retention and job satisfaction while also enabling companies to save on costly churn. Workers value the opportunity to learn, and that value shows up for the bottom line: one analysis found that for every dollar that employers spent on an education benefit program, they generated an additional $1.29 in savings — a 129% return on investment. 'It's clear from the data that workers value the opportunity to learn and grow on the job,' says Jason Tyszko, senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. 'What's becoming increasingly clear is that providing high-quality training creates better job opportunities for employees and measurable benefits for employers. That's shifting the role of the enterprise training function from a cost center to a strategic investment.' No one-size-fits-all approach Expanding access to quality jobs also depends on recognizing that 'quality' is not a uniform definition. Policy, economic and political dynamics vary from state to state, region to region, and industry to industry — and to individual workers, quality can depend on everything from wages to vacation days to intangibles like a sense of fulfillment or respect on-the-job. That, again, is where better data comes in. We may understand the broad strokes of what constitutes a quality job. But the more we understand how worker preferences – and business priorities – vary by industry and region, the easier it will be to develop tailored approaches that reflect the many meanings of quality at work. In many ways, focusing on the adversarial relationship between workers and employers is an understandable position. Human beings are hardwired to choose sides. But to solve a challenge as multifaceted as the need to help more people access quality jobs, policy and business leaders must go beyond the zero-sum game. Building a stronger economy will depend on identifying what we have in common, finding solutions we can agree on, and bridging all-too-common policy and rhetorical divides to reach the goals of prosperity and opportunity that so many of us share.
